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Working Paper
Measuring Income and Wealth at the Top Using Administrative and Survey Data
Administrative tax data indicate that U.S. top income and wealth shares are substantial and increasing rapidly (Piketty and Saez 2003, Saez and Zucman 2014). A key reason for using administrative data to measure top shares is to overcome the under-representation of families at the very top that plagues most household surveys. However, using tax records alone restricts the unit of analysis for measuring economic resources, limits the concepts of income and wealth being measured, and imposes a rigid correlation between income and wealth. The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) solves the ...
Working Paper
Does education loan debt influence household financial distress? An assessment using the 2007-09 SCF Panel
This paper uses the recent 2007-09 SCF panel to examine the influence of student loans on financial distress. Families with student loans in 2007 have higher levels of financial distress than families without such loans, and these families were more susceptible to transitions to financial distress during the early stages of the Great Recession. This correlation persists once we control for a host of other demographic, work-status, and household balance sheet measures. Families with an average level of student loans were 3.1 percentage points more likely to be 60 days late paying bills and 3 ...
Working Paper
A Wealth of Information: Augmenting the Survey of Consumer Finances to Characterize the Full U.S. Wealth Distribution
We use the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to advance U.S. wealth analysis along several dimensions. We develop a comprehensive framework that modifies the SCF to recover the wealth distribution over families, tax units, and individuals from 1989 to 2019. We show that, by ignoring unequal holdings within families, existing estimates considerably understate U.S. inequality across individuals. We find wealth concentration rose through the recent economic recovery, which differs from leading models that capitalize income into wealth even after aligning conceptual differences. We illustrate ...
Discussion Paper
U.S. Families’ Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
Between 2019 and 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic caused severe disruptions to the U.S. labor market and broader economic activity, leading to unprecedented levels of fiscal support. Nonetheless, over this period, net changes in major economic indicators were consistent with a robust economy, and according to the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), U.S. families experienced broad-based improvements in their finances, particularly with respect to net worth (Aladangady et al., 2023).
Working Paper
Your Friends, Your Credit: Social Capital Measures Derived from Social Media and the Credit Market
Chetty et al. (2022a) introduced an array of social capital measures derived from Facebook friendships and found that one of these indicators, economic connectedness (EC), predicted upward income mobility well. Bricker and Li (2017) proposed the average credit score of a community's residents as an indicator of local social trust. We show in this paper that the average credit scores are robustly correlated with EC, negatively correlated with the friending-bias measure introduced in Chetty et al. (2022b), and predict economic mobility to a comparable extent after controlling for EC. The ...
Journal Article
Changes in U.S. family finances from 2007 to 2010: evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
The Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances for 2010 provides insights into changes in family income and net worth since the 2007 survey. The survey shows that, over the 2007?10 period, the median value of real (inflation-adjusted) family income before taxes fell 7.7 percent, while mean income fell more sharply, an 11.1 percent decline. Both median and mean net worth decreased even more dramatically than income over this period, though the relative movements in the median and the mean are reversed; the median fell 38.8 percent, and the mean fell 14.7 percent. This article reviews ...
Discussion Paper
Wealth and Income Concentration in the SCF: 1989–2019
Using 2019 SCF data, we update estimates of the U.S. wealth and income distributions. These data indicate that wealth concentration in 2019 was similar to the levels seen in 2016 and near the historical high over the 1989–2019 period. Income concentration similarly remains high but declined between 2016 and 2019.
Working Paper
Introducing the Distributional Financial Accounts of the United States
This paper describes the construction of the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs), a new dataset containing quarterly estimates of the distribution of U.S. household wealth since 1989, and provides the first look at the resulting data. The DFAs build on two existing Federal Reserve Board statistical products --- quarterly aggregate measures of household wealth from the Financial Accounts of the United States and triennial wealth distribution measures from the Survey of Consumer Finances --- to incorporate distributional information into a national accounting framework. The DFAs complement ...
Discussion Paper
Education Debt Owed by Older Families in the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances
Much of the education debt in the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) currently resides in households headed by person 40 years or older. These families are the focus of this note.
Discussion Paper
How Much Student Debt is Out There?
As is widely known, student loan debt has expanded significantly over the past decade or so and stands at historically high levels. But how much in total do students owe?